Interview: Quentin Tarantino talks 'Inglorious Basterds' and what might have been

By COLE HADDON, FILM.COM

Published 10:00 pm, Saturday, February 27, 2010

A few weeks back, my girlfriend ordered me to suspend what had become a three-day Quentin Tarantino marathon. I don't mean a marathon of his films, though some of them were involved. I mean a marathon of The Man, beginning with a backstage conversation at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival...

...followed by a Q&A at the festival he participated in alongside the other four filmmakers nominated for a Best Director Oscar this year...

...then a special screening he arranged of Kirk Douglas' lost classic, Posse, followed by a Q&A between Tarantino and (holy crap, the 93-year-old legend himself) Douglas...

...and then finally, the next night, a special screening of Tarantino's personal print of the Cannes cut of Kill Bill (uncut, exactly as he presented it at the French film festival before splitting it into two films).

In retrospect, I realize these experiences, as unique as they are, have blended together in my memory as a sort of Quentin Tarantino stew ... or sludge. My girlfriend was right in making me abstain from a another night -- yes, there was a planned fourth night and double feature -- but I won't forget those three days I spent with the frenetic, maybe even manic egomaniac I consider to be the finest, most distinctive director of his generation.

"I came up with the idea around '98, around Jackie Brown," Tarantino said when asked how Inglorious Basterds, for which he's also nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar, came about. "I wrote the first two acts then, but it was too big. It might have been a miniseries, but not a film. Leave it to me to write something too big for the big screen."

He laughs at himself here, always aware of how significant his talent is. It's an off-putting trait for some, while others see it as fully justified by his cinematic oeuvre.

"So I went off and did Kill Bill, then came back to it," Tarantino continued. "I knew I needed to come up with another central story, and that's when I came up with the idea of Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), this Audie Murphy-type character, and the big mission was going to be blowing up his premiere."

And so what did Tarantino have to cut to make room for these new storylines, as well as reshape a miniseries-sized war epic into a manageable feature-length experience? The director is finally talking about this in detail, clearly so in love with his characters that he can't keep them secret any longer.

"I had a whole other story about another regiment of black troops, and they were going to be hanged in London for this crime they had committed, for turning on the American Army that had, in a sense, made war on them [their race]," he explained. This, of course, sounds much more reminiscent of The Inglorious Bastards (1977), the Italian B-film that inspired Tarantino in the first place. In it, Fred Williamson leads a band of deserters on a suicide mission in WWII. This scope, however, is what ultimately forced Tarantino to cut the black troops storyline, a move, he says, that devastated him. "I just had Sergio Leone-itus, where I couldn't introduce any character without 15-minute operatic turns."

When asked if he might return to the world of the Basterds, perhaps to right some of these painful editing losses, Tarantino answered, "Oh, by all means. If I do another Basterds, it would be a prequel, and it would be about these black troops. I think what I wrote about them is some of the best stuff I've ever written, and would also include other characters we already love, like Aldo (Brad Pitt) and the Bear Jew (Eli Roth)."

As anybody who considers himself a fan of Tarantino knows, the guy loves film. He loves talking about film. I highly suspect he sleeps on canisters of film, if only because it helps him feel at home in the reality he exists in. Since he's spoken a lot lately about retiring when he hits 60 (still 14 years off, don't worry), the possibility of eventually teaching what he knows was brought up. "Yeah, I wouldn't teach filmmaking," he responded. "I'd teach film appreciation, the history of film, of following other directors' works. I look forward to retiring as a director, writing books about filmmakers. Maybe open a theater that's so small nobody wants to come to it, and I'll just be the cool old guy there, talking about film."

"Who knows? When I'm 62, I'll direct a film if I want to," he said, amending his previous boasts about an early retirement. "But I do think 60 is a good time to get out. To me, I'm going for a filmography. Thirty years from now, some kid who is watching TV, just like I did with Howard Hawks, I want them to see one of my films and say, 'Wow, who did that?' I want them to be able to delve into my filmography and find my movies are all connected. They all lead back to Reservoir Dogs."

Now, everybody knows that Tarantino is a one-man show. He writes his own stuff. He directs his own stuff. He fiercely resists the idea of collaborating at a studio level, believing himself an auteur in the truest sense. But has he ever considered directing a script that wasn't his? Has he ever gotten his hand on a piece of material so good he had trouble passing it up?

Well, it turns out he has. Back in 1997, producer Joel Silver gave him a draft of Sgt. Rock -- yes, an adaptation of the DC war comic book -- written by David Webb Peoples. Tarantino didn't tell Silver at the time, but he spent two weeks putting together cast lists, seriously ready to make the "potentially classic" film until finally he decided he couldn't go down the route of taking studio directing gigs. Today, he derisively laughs at the idea that WB and Silver are moving Rock, a definitely WWII character, into a sci-fi future.

Aside from Rock, Tarantino more famously contemplated taking on a property the world is more familiar with: James Bond. "The Broccolis are on record as saying Casino Royale was unfilmable, and then I said I wanted to do it," he said, exasperated still today by what went down. "I even tried to get around them [rights-wise], but it just couldn't happen." Ultimately, rights-holders, the Broccolis, used his interest to drum up studio support for a franchise reboot based on the book they previously thought was unfilmable. "They should've put me in the 'thank yous' at least!" Tarantino added.

So what's next for the writer-director? It's a question often posed to him, and one he answers in various degrees of detail depending, as near as I can tell, on how much soda he's consumed. "I would love to make a full-on, no bullshit Western," he declared. "I'd love to make a romantic comedy, and take it out of the ghetto it's been exiled to."

A romantic comedy, really? After all, Tarantino's not exactly known for his, um, romantic touch.

"I have done love stories; they've just been in my other movies," he pointed out. "True Romance's title was not ironic. Sure, James Gandolfini almost beats Patricia Arquette to death and she has to blow him away with a shotgun, but that doesn't mean it's not romantic. It just has to be done my way, and I think people want me to do it my way."

He concluded his "coming attractions" answer with, "At a certain point, there's a third Kill Bill movie. A prequel to Basterds. And sooner or later, I'll make another gangster film." For a director who tends to make a movie every three years, that's a lot to get done before the big 6-0.